Devil makes three.

THE DEVIL MAKES THREE is a whisky-drinking, poker-playing, working-class three piece based out of Santa Cruz, CA. But don't hold that against them. At first glance Pete, Cooper and Lucia look more like the kind of folks that the good ol' boys would be stomping and driving out of town instead of singing along with. But don't hold that against them either. Complete with an upright bass, steel and acoustic guitars and a grassroots no-one's-going-to-do-it-for-us-but-us attitude, these three are not at all what you run across every day in record stores over-saturated with redundant crap. They're more country than punk, and more bluegrass than rock. And that's exactly why they deserve a good, hard listen.

What are the ups and downs of doing it on your own?

L: We don't have any money.

C: But on the other side of that we have all the money that we've made.

Somebody's got to keep you guys living in the lap of luxury.

P: Actually our van is pretty close to the lap of luxury as far as we're concerned.

C: It's huge. We've got the van, we've all gotten amps, and we don't buy guitar strings anymore.

L: We just repressed our CD and it didn't cost us anything out of pocket. So at this point we are not paying for anything out of pocket, but personally we're not making any money.

How is it living at an uncooperative Soviet-hippie pseudo-commune in Santa Cruz?

P: Cooper doesn't live there so he's a lucky person, but he comes oven. There's 10 people who live there, so at times it can be at the height of claustrophobia.

So Cash or Clash?

L: I'd like some Cash.

C: Who said that? Tupac? "All I want is money. Fuck the fame, I'm a simple man."

Most of your stuff is fairly simple, but at the same time pretty deep and personal.

P: You know what? The hardest part was making it simple. When Cooper and I first started playing we went overboard with the' complexity. Cooper was really into metal and all these different things, and I was really into like finger picking music and really strange timing. So then the two of us came together and it was totally fucked up because them was too much going on. And slowly we were like, "OK, all I have to do is something simple; you do something simple; she does something simple, we sing and it sounds good." But we had to whittle it down from this really complex noodling shit.

Basically dumb it down.

P: For the masses.

C: It sounded good if we could pull it off; but there was no likelihood of us, being able to pull it off live.

L: We're kind of learning that we can write really cool, complex parts--but it's cool when you do it once or twice in a song instead of just doing it constantly because that's boring. So we'll come up with something really cool; "We're just doing it right here, we're not doing it throughout the whole song." So it actually really stands out.

What's the most rugged place you guys have played?

P: Oh, man, Astoria, Oregon was pretty rugged--it's a tiny town outside of Portland on the mouth of the Columbia River. Wednesday night, small town. We're not expecting much. We played on the radio and shit, but we were like "Whatever, probably not that many people will come." Then the boat docks, the navy boat, and all the sailors--there was like 150 or 200 sailors in the town of Astoria, which has like two bars. So they all came to our show and they were fucking loaded, completely out of control, screaming, drunken sailors.

So what do you do with a drunken sailor?

P: We just played, man. We convinced them all to buy CDs they were so drunk. We made a good amount of money that night. It was probably one of the weirdest situations I've ever been in.

C: We played with a bunch of punk rock bands in the city park up in Redding--a bunch of drunken underage kids.

Are you ever surprised at how broad the demographic of your fanbase is?

P: Oh, hell yeah. From the park in Redding where everybody is just running around going crazy--it goes from that to the Swine Soiree, the KPIG festival. We played in Boulder Creek and there was this 65-year old lady--we're playing these old-timey songs and she's singing along. It was awesome.

L: At first these random 15eople would come up to me and say "I heard you on KPIG and. I think you're great." They're totally straight looking 40-year-old women, but it's awesome. That's the way to do it. We play punk rock shows that are so much fun, then we can go play things like the Swine Soiree or Henflings and make a lot of money. Well, for us a lot of money.

The Devil Makes Three is: Pete Bernhard, steel guitar, Cooper McBean, acoustic guitar, Lucia Turino, upright Bass/ visit: www.monkeywrenchproductions.com